Bullshit graph database performance benchmarks

I think that part is still fine, because there he's only saying that he got different results for the same test on his hardware, which might help to set a baseline. Really weird is the table after "Let’s see the breakdown". It's not super clearly labeled so I'm not fully sure which data is which, but it looks he's comparing neo4j on his machine to memgraph on their older hardware, that would be very silly. Looking at the source for the benchmark, that also seems to hold.

Seems like he does in his conclusion:

> It looks like Neo4j is faster than Memgraph in the Aggregate queries by about 3 times.

I am really stunned by this story. It made me check the MemGraph benchmarks section. Don't get me wrong, it may be 10-100x faster than Neo4J in even the most basic operations. Moreover, given the quality of Neo4J, it is hard not to be that much quicker. Even Postgres and MySQL are better at storing graphs than Neo4J.

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Disclosure: I have worked on Graph Algorithms, Graph Databases, and Database Engines for years, and we are now preparing a commercial solution based on UKV [1]. I don't know anyone at MemGraph or Neo4J. Never used the first. As for the second, I am not a fan.

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Aside from licensing, there are 3 primary complaints. I will address them individually, and I am open to a discussion.

A. Using Python for Benchmarks instead of Gatling. I don't entirely agree with this. Python still has the fastest-growing programming community while already being one of the 2 most popular languages. Gatling, however, never heard of it. Choosing between the two, I would pick Python. But neither works if you want to design a High-Performance benchmark for a fast system. Without automatic memory management and expensive runtimes, you can only implement those in C, C++, Rust, or another systems-programming language. We have faced that too many times that the benchmark itself works worse than the system it is trying to evaluate [2].

B. Using hardware from 2010 [3], weird datasets [4]. This shocked me. When I looked at the charts [5] and the benchmarking section, it seemed highly professional and good-looking. I wouldn't expect less from a startup with $20M VC funding. But the devil is in the details. I would have never expected anyone benchmarking a new DBMS to use now 13-year-old CPUs and an unknown dataset. Assuming current developer salaries, hiring people to design a DBMS doesn't make sense if you will be evaluating on a $1000 machine is just financially irresponsible. We buy expensive servers, they cost like sports cars or even apartments in poorer countries. It is hard to maintain, but they are essential to quality work. It is sad to see companies taking such shortcuts. But to be a devil's advocate, there is no 1 graph benchmark or dataset that everyone agrees on. So I imagine people experimenting with multiple real datasets of different sizes or generating them systemically using one of the Random Generator algorithms. In UKV, we have used Twitter data to construct both document and graph collections. In the past, we have also used `ci-patent`, `bio-mouse-gene`, `human-Jung2015-M87102575`, and hundreds of other public datasets from the Network Repository and SNAP [6]. There are datasets of every shape and size, reaching around 1 Billion edges, in case someone is searching for data. For us the next step is the reconstruction of the Web from the 300 TB CommonCrawl dataset [7]. There is no such Graph benchmark in existence, but it is the biggest public dataset we could find.

C. Running query different number of times for various engines. This can be justified, and it is how current benchmarks are done. You are tracking not just the mean execution time but also variability, so if at some point results converge, you abrupt before hitting the expected iterations number to save time.

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LDBC [8] seems like a good contestant for a potential industry standard, but it needs to be completed. Its "Business Intelligence workload" and "Interactive workload" categories exclude any real "Graph Analytics". Running an All-Pairs-Shortest-Paths algorithm on a large external memory graph could have been a much more interesting integrated benchmark. Similarly, one can make large-scale community detection or personalized recommendations based on Graphs and evaluate the overall cost/performance. It, however, poses another big challenge. Almost all algorithm implementations for those problems are vertex-centric. They scale poorly with large sparse graphs that demand edge-centric algorithms, so a new implementation has to be written from scratch. We will try to allocate more resources towards that in 2023 and invite anyone curious to join.

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[1] https://github.com/unum-cloud/ukv [2] https://unum.cloud/post/2022-03-22-ucsb [3] https://github.com/memgraph/memgraph/tree/master/tests/mgben... [4] https://github.com/memgraph/memgraph/tree/master/tests/mgben... [5] https://memgraph.com/benchgraph/base [6] https://snap.stanford.edu/data [7] https://commoncrawl.org [8] https://ldbcouncil.org/benchmarks/snb

Not to mention that engineering expertise is just the potential. You then also need the time and the willingness to actually do that kind of tedious and potentially slow moving work instead of all the other things on your list. And as we all know, the list of things that can be improved in any system typically grows over time.

The 'out of the box' or naive and un-optimized performance of something is the baseline. And with something as huge and self-contained as a database you want the happy path to be fine in terms of performance.

That number should be "The total 3-year price of the entire Priced Configuration must be reported, including: hardware, software, and maintenance charges", so they just took the cost of the hardware used for benchmark, and extended it to 3 years.

If you look into the blog post: https://www.databricks.com/blog/2021/11/02/databricks-sets-o..., you will see that it costed $242